An End to Inequality by Jonathan Kozol

AN END TO INEQUALITY by Jonathan Kozol is about “Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America” with a call for reparations. Kozol is an award-winning, best-selling author of other titles like Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, The Shame of the Nation, and Rachel and Her Children. He has been writing about American schools since the mid-1960s and his recent text continues to present pleas for more equitable situations. Significant and disturbing statistics are woven throughout and he writes at length about “a parallel divide between two words of pedagogic practice and methods of instructional control: one of them a tightly wired code of discipline and training that is held to be appropriate for children of one class and race, the other with more space and time for children to take some joy in learning as an act of exploration.” In the final chapter, Kozol points to school libraries (and their absence) as another measure of how educational opportunities differ. He says, “in Chicago, only ten percent of schools in which Black children make up the largest proportion of the student population still have school librarians, according to an investigative study published in 2021 and cited in a lengthy piece of disturbing reportage by the Chicago Sun Times in 2022.” AN END TO INEQUALITY received a starred review from Kirkus. (“Most impressive is Kozol’s ability to draw connections among disparate events to illustrate the underlying systems driving the nation’s greatest inequities.”). Endnotes and sources encompass roughly a fourth of the well-researched text.